Storytelling in Beckett's collected shorter plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
"The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of estrangement, constitute the main business of the theatre; everything hangs on the story; it is the heart of the theatrical performance" (Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre). Thus it is observed that, in...
What is an American?, from Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
A Frenchman by birth, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735?-1813) soon transformed himself into Hector St. John as part of his quest to become an epitome of the American farmer. Leaving his mother land around 1754 as a pioneer to French Canada, he finally settled in America in the...
Twelfth night, William Shakespeare, Acte II, scene V
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Written in 1599 and first performed in 1602, "Twelfth Night?, like other Shakespearean comedies, presents us with a blend of realism and a fanciful atmosphere. The main plot deals with the love triangle between the countess Olivia, her suitor the Duke Orsino, and Viola, a shipwrecked young woman...
Critical Commentary on Paul Verlaine's Une Grande Dame
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Paul Verlaine was born in 1844 and died in Paris in 1896. His work ?Une Grande Dame' is, therefore, an orthodox Petrarchan sonnet, as was typical of the poetry composed from the sixteenth century onward. In this document, I shall be studying form, imagery and vocabulary in particular, but...
The shining
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
By choosing to produce ?The Shining' Stephen King's masterpiece, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick tackled one of the most bounded and codified cinematographic genres: the fantastic mode. Kubrick produced the film just after the relative failure of Barry Lyndon, and this time, it was a huge...
Repetition, Re(-)presentation and Interpretation in Beckett's Shorter Plays
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
When one reads Beckett's works for the first time, one cannot but be stricken by the overabundant repetitions the text is replete with. There seems to be a real compulsion of repetition in various forms- in Beckett' plays. This is most evident in his shorter works. During this seminar, we...
Darwin and darwinian infuence on Thomas Hardy (Jude The Obscure) and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass)
Dissertation - 58 pages - Literature
Charles Darwin's theories upon “Evolution” had a great impact on the scientific world in the nineteenth century, and contributed to change with respect to mentalities in a well-established Victorian society. He is mostly remembered for his conception of Evolutionism based on his theory...
Coriolanus (act two, scene one)
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's play Coriolanus is a political tragedy, which exposes the events that took place in Rome in the early days of the Republic. This play is set up around 490 BC, at a time when the city was divided by a conflict between the Patricians and the Plebeians because of shortage of grain....
Commentary upon Mary Shelley's statement: "What terrified me will terrify others"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Creature in itself is not what is the most terrifying. Indeed, in her dream and in the novel afterwards, if Doctor Frankenstein is afraid at the sight of his creature, it is also its coming to life which creates fear: how can an amount of bones, skin,...
Women in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In The Canterbury Tales, women appear either as storytellers or as part of the tales themselves. We must therefore make a clear distinction between the women of the pilgrimage and the characters mentioned in the tales. The former are supposed to belong to the real life, if we agree to play the...
A Scanner Darkly, by Philippe K. Dick
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
The novel, deals with drugs and its consequences, its process of marginalization of distorted social relationships, the subjective deterioration of reality, hallucinations and the paranoia that they generate, Richard Linklater will bring out an adaptation of the letter and the spirit. Adapted...
The fantastic atmosphere in The Moon Bog by HP Lovecraft
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
In his short story entitled ?The Moon Bog', Lovecraft adheres to his methods to create a genuine fantastic atmosphere. Both his style and his narration contribute to the setting of a cosmic ambiance in a very effective way. From the point of view of the narrative, the themes in this short...
Orwell said in an essay titled Why I write : "It is my purpose to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." How far does Orwell achieve this in 1984 ? - published: 29/09/2010
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
It is to be remembered that George Orwell fought for the Republicans (against Franco) in Spain towards the end of 1936. It was during this battle that Orwell was wounded. We know that George Orwell's ?Nineteen Eighty-Four' (published in 1949) publication was given this title because the...
Ways of Rendering Student Slang in Salinger Novel "The Catcher in the Rye"
Dissertation - 48 pages - Literature
Slang, as the most mentioned representative word form of the informal vocabulary, occupies a prominent role in contemporary society. It has become the second language of any democratic country. Everybody uses it even if one pretends that he has never used it. It is a veritable issue and it will...
Book review - The Stranger
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
I feel that in this novel there are two major elements that stand out from all of the rest. First and foremost, there is Meursault, a shipping clerk and main character, with so many oddities and fascinations that it is hard to not try to figure him out. He has no substance in his life and does...
Death as reality: A response to Christopher S. Glover's critical analysis of Don DeLillo's White noise
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In this essay, I will systematically dissect Christopher S. Glover's categorization of Don DeLillo's White Noise as an example of Baudrillard's third stage of simulacrum while presenting an alternate interpretation that suggests the novel actually represents a deviation on...
The misdiagnosis of postpartum depression in the 19th Century and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1892, was originally published as a work of Gothic fiction. Through a biographical analysis - and the author's own admission - we now know that the story contains many real elements drawn from the author's own...
A close reading of The ascetic in a canoe
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Through his essay, The Ascetic in a Canoe, Pierre Elliot Trudeau attempts to describe his personal relationship with nature, through imagery, visualizations and deep descriptions of Canada's natural environment. Nature is shown as a companion in the otherwise vast openness. Nature is the great...
A radical faith: The Bible versus Orpheus and poetry - An analysis of Emily Dickinson's poem 1577
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Emily Dickinson's poem 1577, “The Bible is an antique Volume-,” the speaker questions blind adherence to Biblical belief and ultimately proposes the adoption of a new faith. Through skeptical tone and understated form, the poem elegantly demeans the Bible's authority as the sole...
Much ado about nothing: The power of perception in Shakespeare's comedy
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Although American culture places great emphasis on the silver screen, the medium has its limitations. Among them are a relatively short length of time in which to work, a broad audience with a short attention span, and several conventions to be observed when making a film in terms of plot...
Indigenous resurgence in the contemporary Caribbean (Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 & 13)
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In a contemporary sense, perspectives of the Caribbean have been created in a way that does not speak of the indigenous and aboriginal peoples of the areas as much as they should. This is likely to change though as these indigenous and aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean are once again gaining...
The restless heart: The theme of scattered humanity in Augustine's Confessions
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
At the very beginning of his Confessions, Augustine states “[men's] hearts are restless till they rest in [God].” However, because of how he views the human condition, Augustine explains that man is continuously “scattered” by his own impermanence and is always moving through...
The middle finger that is Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
By the time Churchill dropped the iron curtain across Europe, America was giving up on the idea of a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union. Foreign policy was being dictated by such blatant anti-communist and anti-Russian works as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, as well as the...
The mythological supports of Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, existence made up of binary oppositions, replacing one another in a never-ending cycle. The most prominent--and the most basic-- of these oppositions is that of life and death. Through an exploration of various mythological allusions made in the play, the...
The enigma of 5.1.19 in Richard III
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Richard III as a historical play is interesting because of its large focus on questions of the supernatural. The play considers, or forces the reader to consider, such ideas as the power of prophecy and dreams, ghostly interactions, pre-destination, divine intervention, and so on. The...
The ambiguity of motive in Chaucer's Canterbury tales
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
The reality presented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one that is skewed by both Chaucer, the writer, and his fictional persona of humble narrator, who is the only source of information in the poem. The resulting overlay of these different perspectives and the reader's dependence on...
The effect of the pilgrim's purpose in Chaucer's Canterbury fabliaux
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
According to Robert E. Lewis in his “The English Fabliau Tradition and Chaucer's ‘Miller's Tale',” the heyday of the French fabliaux lasted from “the late twelfth century to the 1340s.” In addition, as Lewis goes on to point out, the French genre appeared in several...
Roman, provincial and Islamic law by Patricia Crone
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The basic thesis of Patricia Crone's Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law is that the sharia is, at least in part, derived from what the author calls “Roman provincial law”, and not from pre-Islamic Arabian cultures, other Near-East cultures (Egyptians, Akkadians and Jews among others) or...
Victorian morals in Dracula
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Two of the most compelling and interesting themes and elements of Dracula are the themes of “life as a positive and perpetual entity”, and the fleeting, sinful and worthless nature of a life centered around earthly pleasures and indulgences. The theme of the perpetuity of some kind of...
The Handmaid's tale
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Margaret Atwood's “The Handmaid's Tale” is described as a classic dystopian novel, presenting the subjugation of women under a theocratic totalitarian social framework in a fictitious future. Atwood's dystopia takes place in the Republic of Gilead and the narrator is the central...
